Some new urbanists have started to talk about building “cool neighborhoods” from scratch, a term and, indeed, a concept — further reducing “cool” to yet another marketable, finance-able lifestyle choice — that I find highly suspicious.

One of the first such attempts that I’ve seen is The Lab, which self-consciously styles itself as “the anti-mall” down the street from monstrous South Coast Plaza — the 100% corner in prototypically suburban, obscenely wealthy Orange County, California. I suppose it’s inevitable that OC, with three million residents, would spawn some demand for underground techno, manga collectibles, and Urban Outfitters — and since the default building type there is the strip mall, it was time to build a strip mall for just that.

Next door, of course, is The Camp, where folks drive their bike-rack-ed SUVs into the parking lot and stroll past fake boulders and a vegan restaurant to get to their Bikram yoga classes. It’s all so self-consciously unreal and almost embarrassing, like someone trying too hard and yet not quite getting it. (Self-consciously cool Flash websites: thelab.com and thecampsite.com)

Both, of course, are just (indisputably successful) strip malls — a different sort of “lifestyle center” for a different sort of lifestyle, but just as creepily sanitized. There appears to be nothing intrinsically urban about “cool” retail after all; it’s just that cities offer an operating environment that requires less start-up capital, thanks to the decrepit and cheap building stock. But it appears that even grassroots, hip lifestyles that proclaim their skepticism of The Man can be successfully reduced, co-opted, and commodified as just another strip mall, financed by mortgage backed securities and ready for replication in Anytown, USA.

[originally posted to the Urbangeneration list]